As a former softdev with 1/10th the experience and thousand yard stare as this guy, there’s a lot of truth and wisdom here. I LOL'd when he said "TDD is a damn cult." 😆
“Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.”
Yes 👏 the less I write to get something done, the better. The more people can understand and build on it, even better.
When I was a manager I always tried to take the fall for any mistake by my team that would be visible outside my team. I hope today someone from my team has the same feeling about it as this guy does.
Synthetic chemist here. A lot of this transfers quite well. The documentation point is real and underappreciated in chemistry. Good experimental write-ups are a dying art. The part about not hating your job more than you love your field hit differently. The intern and junior colleague point also resonates. Some of the most useful things I have learned in the lab came from people earlier in their careers than me..
> 5-10 yoe doesn't make you a top dog though. A top dog has both the technical prowess for Leet code/System design, excellent communication skills and has been lucky enough, strategic enough or skilled enough to have been in charge of atleast part of an awesome feature/project that they can talk about. They basically clear nearly all of their interviews even at big tech even now.
For instance, MFW new team mate cleared Meta, Roblox and Google and only chose our company cause it was remote and he wanted to fuck off to Hawaii. Recruiter also had to go out of band for him lmao.
most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. This is real i think organize , manage,create template and most importantly maintenance the docs are very engineering things and they can be dangerous technical debt that will hurt.
SQL is king. I've started fleshing out my clickhouse stuff. conceptually its tough to think differently in terms of my database. I use to just use sql for crud, whatever, it was always the database dude's job to handle it. now its on my plate and honestly I've been bummed. I learned I really really like working with data. Manipulating it, finding things in it. SQL can do so much and ive unfortunately spent a lot of time trying to find a way around it.
"What’s the worse that can happen? He fire me? I’ll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks."
Oh, the good old days...
The entire premise of this drunken list is based on the belief of that a person can quit any job and get a new one within a couple of weeks.
yeah, what great times those were!
As a former softdev with 1/10th the experience and thousand yard stare as this guy, there’s a lot of truth and wisdom here. I LOL'd when he said "TDD is a damn cult." 😆
“Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.”
Yes 👏 the less I write to get something done, the better. The more people can understand and build on it, even better.
This reads like it was written in 2021.
I'm not seeing a ton of things changed since then
Thank you for your drunken sacrifice.
When I was a manager I always tried to take the fall for any mistake by my team that would be visible outside my team. I hope today someone from my team has the same feeling about it as this guy does.
This was a great read ! Thank you for reposting this as I wouldn’t have found it any other way. Thoroughly enjoyed
Synthetic chemist here. A lot of this transfers quite well. The documentation point is real and underappreciated in chemistry. Good experimental write-ups are a dying art. The part about not hating your job more than you love your field hit differently. The intern and junior colleague point also resonates. Some of the most useful things I have learned in the lab came from people earlier in their careers than me..
Be kind and work hard.
A comment from r/cscareerquestions
> 5-10 yoe doesn't make you a top dog though. A top dog has both the technical prowess for Leet code/System design, excellent communication skills and has been lucky enough, strategic enough or skilled enough to have been in charge of atleast part of an awesome feature/project that they can talk about. They basically clear nearly all of their interviews even at big tech even now.
For instance, MFW new team mate cleared Meta, Roblox and Google and only chose our company cause it was remote and he wanted to fuck off to Hawaii. Recruiter also had to go out of band for him lmao.
23 likes
Delusional as best
Wow. We need to get more people drunk and writing. That was amazing!
most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. This is real i think organize , manage,create template and most importantly maintenance the docs are very engineering things and they can be dangerous technical debt that will hurt.
SQL is king. I've started fleshing out my clickhouse stuff. conceptually its tough to think differently in terms of my database. I use to just use sql for crud, whatever, it was always the database dude's job to handle it. now its on my plate and honestly I've been bummed. I learned I really really like working with data. Manipulating it, finding things in it. SQL can do so much and ive unfortunately spent a lot of time trying to find a way around it.
I love this!
Bro. Blessed to have come across this early in my career.
This is the underrated thing about posts like this.
10 years of experience can now be compressed into a 10yr.md kernel.
Not theory, just scars / tradeoffs / red flags / decision rules someone else can actually reuse as long prompts.